One of the benefits of being a flighty entrepreneur is the natural ability to recall useless information at the drop of a hat, sometimes employing said trivia at an initial client meeting (”hey sandra, did you know Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher survived on four hours sleep a night, yeah its true! Now please sign here”), other times injecting some truth-deprived prose in our marketing literature (”31% of our survey respondents said they were 66% sure they might consider our product over the leading competitor!). However sometimes commercial trivia/statistics/lore can actually be quite useful.Take food facts for instance. Food technology, or Psychophysics fascinates me, as does the marketing and technological initiatives employed by those who tango with our esophagus (esophagi?).

So this week I thought I’d share this little passion, research, and then adequately present five food facts in such a way that they might indeed apply to your industry. Read on my succulent suitors, and by all means let me know if I’ve missed any juicy bits.

1. Fast Food Giant or Real Estate Circus?
   The Psedonym “The Golden Arches” should have been our first clue, because McDonalds isn’t actually a food business, nor is it a lifestyle brand, but rather they are one of the worlds most successful landlords. Harry Sonneborn (McDonalds 2IC) once said ““We are in the real estate business. The only reason we sell hamburgers is because they are the greatest producer of revenue from which our tenants can pay us rent.”. Mmmm bricks and mortar. So what’s the takeout here? Well I’d like to think that in all businesses the chief role of the marketer is to differentiate by presenting an alternate core message to one’s competitors, but perhaps the real message here is that we’re all missing some prime opportunity that exists right under our noses!
2. Red & Yellow
   On the subject of fast food, ever wondered why most if not all fast food chains use Red and Yellow in their logos/marketing collateral? The psychology of color has long attributed these colours to the conditioned responses of hunger, desire, and urgency. Others posit that it may hark back to when we as humans needed to decipher between raw and ripe fruit. In any case this phenomenon is completely at odds with my days as a branding consultant, where 9 out of 10 clients wanted a royal blue logo and some kind of swoosh. What colours are you employing in your identity/marketing collateral, and are you aware of the kind of affects they can have on prospects/existing clients?
3. The Just Noticeable Difference
   My Marketing Lecturer (Hi Bronwyn) once enthralled our entire class with the Just Noticeable Difference theorem (or the JND for the hip marketers out there). The JND is the statistical measurement of noticeable change used by marketers to (usually) reduce a product without raising the ire of the customer. While usually somewhat sinister in its application (e.g. charging the same price for a packet of chips that has 5 fewer crisps inside, or reducing a mars bar by 4% to save costs) the technique can also be applied to packaging for environmental reasons (e.g. cocacola reducing the amount of aluminium required in their cans) or indeed you might use it to cut costs or increase the time available to service your beloved clients.
4. Intermission - A video!
   One of my favourite business-related texts is Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point (if you’ve never read it go directly to your local independent book store and buy it, now! Go on! The rest of this blog pales in comparison). So here I pay my respects to Malcolm Gladwell, paying his respects to Dr Howard Moskowitz, the father of focus group testing and just generally making Americans Happy. Here Malcom recounts how Howard changed the entire food industry in the US, not by discovering the perfect pickle, but rather the perfect pickles.
5. Finally, a slight on supermarkets
   Supermarket Tech is perhaps the most conniving of all food-related marketing technology, . They position their bread and milk at the diagonal extremities of the building to encourage compulsive purchases, they position red lights over their meat to present a better product, they play Coldplay to slow shoppers down (you could just shorten that to “they play Coldplay”), and some parent-hating-venomous-visual-merchandiser out there once decided to place all of the lollies at 5-year old eye-level at the counter (right when you’re parental patience has ebbed to capitulation levels!). These are all amazing marketing techniques, and I love them for what they are, but please remember that using such techniques may increase your bottom line but will also increase your time in purgatory.

– Ben Prendergast

I’ve become progressively more adept at organising my business using nothing more than a cache of simple tricks, technical tools, and incredible typing speed.In fact I recently mused that I can type as quickly as I can think, which makes me somewhat of a precognitive typist – a scribe savant, if you will – or really just exposes me as someone who should think before they speak: take this sentence, for instance.

So this week I thought I’d share my personal tech time-savers for the digital entrepreneur.

1. Get down with RSS. “Really Simple Syndication” (or as Oprah called it, “Ready for Some Stories” woot! *pumps air with fist and then earnestly nods*) isn’t really anything new, but it does provide a way to keep track of interesting and high-value information (as it relates to your field of excellence). I wasn’t always a blog junkie, but lately I’ve really latched on to a few bloggists that boil my potatoes (intellectually), and using RSS is a fantastic way for me to keep on top of my game. The upside to all this extra reading is that I’ve become somewhat of a technological George Negus (minus the comb-over). The downside is that managing all this extra info can be a little tiresome. So I use Safari’s in-built RSS reader, which shows me the number of unread posts for each blog in my favourites. If you don’t have a mac, Safari is also now available for PC, or you could try Google Reader.
2. A mouse with ridiculous number of buttons. For example, I run with a Logitech MX900 (with an impressive eight buttons) and I also use some fantastic Japanese Mouse Controller Software (of course over there they just call it mouse controller software) called Steermouse. With this combination (and again, sorry, with my Mac) I can use my mouse to view my desktop, see all my open windows, close a window, and in my mail program I even have specific actions mapped to my mouse buttons (e.g. delete a message, reply, send to specific folders). With mice (unlike their mammal-equivalent) more is more.
3. Super Signatures. I’m not sure how many emails you send a day, but I usually receive about 150 a day – 100 of them in the morning. Most require a response. My all-time record for emails sent in a day? 180. Easy ladies! So I needed a way to clone my digital self, and canned signatures is the way to go. Here’s how it works: Say you often receive emails that ask the same question, all you do is copy your regular signature and create a new one, but this time add your canned response, for example: “Hi Jim, the answer to your question is eight mouse buttons, love, Ben”, then the next time that question rolls in you can choose the signature that contains the response and edit it from there. I know one organisation that has a set of signatures the whole sales department uses.
4. Multiple Monitors. Ultimate fantasy? Me and two… er… monitors. Two heads are better than one, that’s why I roll with two monitors. I also like to split my right and left brain functions to each of the monitors. So on the right monitor I have mail, skype, and calculator (ie, super serious side), and on the left are my creative applications such as Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Quickbooks. In short, monitor bigamy is the new fondu!
5. Type with 10 fingers. This one’s really simple: learn to type with 10 rather than two fingers and you’re likely to be five times more efficient. In an increasing textual world the Hunt & Peck technique is as passe as the celebrity counterparts.

– Ben Prendergast

Yes, let’s continue with the five vibe.

Despite this blog regularly benefitting from stories posted on other blogs, I felt it was high time I shared with you all my Top Five Favourite Internet Resources for Awesomeness (TFIRA).

Some of these are related to entrepreneurialism, some relate to current technological affairs (like Today Tonight, albeit with a smattering of credibility) and some of them are just cool.

So let’s get started on the TFIRA, each link guaranteed to please*

1. Trendwatching: I get this email once a month, and each month the trendwatching crew like to coin new marketing phenomena like “Trysumers”, “Customer-made”, and my favourite “Infolust”. This month we take a look at Female Fever, and no, it isn’t female menopause. Trendwatching is just wonderful Internetery! (that’s mine).
2. Treehugger: Green goes Pop! Make Treehugger your favourite resource for reducing your (and your organisation’s) carbon footprint. A fantastic look into the collective conservational consciousness.
3. Engadget: Yes, one of the most popular tech blogs going around, but nothing short of brilliant up-to-the-minute tech and gadget news to keep your inner-geek satiated.
4. Music Thing: This one is a little more personal, but covers amazing music-related gadgets, rare YouTube performances, robots that play Guitar Hero, and uncovers things like the ugliest band ever.
5. Littleladyluxe: This is an act of self-preservation, and OK maybe a pinch of pride. Each week my other half (who’s handy with a sewing machine) produces a new work. Each new item fondly reminds me that our credit card is safe for another week.

*Actual links may not please.

So, what are your favourite website sanctuaries?

– Ben Prendergast

And so it was on Tuesday that Jobs descended from Mt Cupertino and delivered to the faithful the much coveted iPhone.

A product somewhat smaller than Moses’s tablets of 4000 years before, but nevertheless a device poised to deliver a similar impact, at least in technological terms. But what’s all the fuss about?

In a nutshell, the iPhone promises to do for mobile telephones what the iPod has done for music. That is, to deliver a simplified yet rich user experience, combining for the first time a phone, contacts, calendar, email, real internet browsing and, in a unique twist, a promising partnership with Google.

Check out this ad, and the entire platform makes sense.

As an entrepreneur, business technologist, and design sympathiser, I can’t help but feel excited by a deliciously sexy device that delivers real-time access to the internet, and otherwise creates a platform where I have all the benefits of my home Mac when I’m on the road.

However, is this anything new? I think so, in execution at least, and here is a short list of the everyday features that people are going to love about the iPhone.

• It’s the most logical phone on the planet. Easily find a contact in an email, contacts list, website, and call them.
• Late for an appointment? Can’t find an address? Need directions? Google Maps are now in your pocket.
• Web-based services are hugely popular and here the divide is crossed into handheld territory en-masse for the first time. MySpace, Salesforce, Twitter, productivity tools, newspapers, SmartCompany, Crikey! Great for my own benefit or when working with clients.
• Music & Movies. Browse the iTunes store anywhere and download music/movies for the road.
• Cheap phone calls? I use Skype religiously, and one can only imagine that delivering VOIP/WiFi functions for iPhone is just on the horizon.

Our short technological history is littered with examples of products that were seemingly “under featured” yet ultimately succeeded because they got the mix of usability and functionality right, and then evolved to meet new requirements. Like the iPod before it, I suspect the iPhone will part the waters for Apple Corp and deliver yet another fantastic growth story.

What do you think?

– Ben Prendergast